HealthDial: A No-Code LLM-Assisted Dialogue Authoring Tool for Healthcare Virtual Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nouraei, Farnaz, Yong, Zhuorui, Bickmore, Timothy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nouraei, Farnaz
Yong, Zhuorui
Bickmore, Timothy
author_facet Nouraei, Farnaz
Yong, Zhuorui
Bickmore, Timothy
contents We introduce HealthDial, a dialogue authoring tool that helps healthcare providers and educators create virtual agents that deliver health education and counseling to patients over multiple conversations. HealthDial leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically create an initial session-based plan and conversations for each session using text-based patient health education materials as input. Authored dialogue is output in the form of finite state machines for virtual agent delivery so that all content can be validated and no unsafe advice is provided resulting from LLM hallucinations. LLM-drafted dialogue structure and language can be edited by the author in a no-code user interface to ensure validity and optimize clarity and impact. We conducted a feasibility and usability study with counselors and students to test our approach with an authoring task for cancer screening education. Participants used HealthDial and then tested their resulting dialogue by interacting with a 3D-animated virtual agent delivering the dialogue. Through participants' evaluations of the task experience and final dialogues, we show that HealthDial provides a promising first step for counselors to ensure full coverage of their health education materials, while creating understandable and actionable virtual agent dialogue with patients.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_15898
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HealthDial: A No-Code LLM-Assisted Dialogue Authoring Tool for Healthcare Virtual Agents
Nouraei, Farnaz
Yong, Zhuorui
Bickmore, Timothy
Human-Computer Interaction
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
68T42
I.2.1; J.3
We introduce HealthDial, a dialogue authoring tool that helps healthcare providers and educators create virtual agents that deliver health education and counseling to patients over multiple conversations. HealthDial leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically create an initial session-based plan and conversations for each session using text-based patient health education materials as input. Authored dialogue is output in the form of finite state machines for virtual agent delivery so that all content can be validated and no unsafe advice is provided resulting from LLM hallucinations. LLM-drafted dialogue structure and language can be edited by the author in a no-code user interface to ensure validity and optimize clarity and impact. We conducted a feasibility and usability study with counselors and students to test our approach with an authoring task for cancer screening education. Participants used HealthDial and then tested their resulting dialogue by interacting with a 3D-animated virtual agent delivering the dialogue. Through participants' evaluations of the task experience and final dialogues, we show that HealthDial provides a promising first step for counselors to ensure full coverage of their health education materials, while creating understandable and actionable virtual agent dialogue with patients.
title HealthDial: A No-Code LLM-Assisted Dialogue Authoring Tool for Healthcare Virtual Agents
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
68T42
I.2.1; J.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15898